After a series of seemingly endless adjustments – lighting angles, his distance from the camera, his speaking pace – in a studio in the basement of Woodruff Library, Professor of Music Steve Everett began his lecture. His audience: nearly 35,000 students, the majority of which live outside the U.S.
"Hello, my name is Steve Everett," he said to the camera. "I'm a professor of music at Emory University, and I want to talk to you about a course I'm offering: The Introduction to Digital Sound Design."
Everett, one of the three Emory professors now teaching massive open online courses (MOOCs), launched a virtual class providing free, not-for-credit education for upwards of 30,000 students across the globe.
Emory has joined 33 other universities – including Stanford, Duke, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – in collaboration with Coursera, an American-based company bringing a diverse, growing student body free, not-for-credit courses.
These courses, the subjects of which range from equine nutrition to fundamentals of personal financial planning, last between three and 15 weeks and require a weekly workload of three to four hours. Those who complete a course receive a certificate from its professor, as well as a new set of skills.
Everett's four-week Introduction to Digital Sound Design began on Coursera Monday. His class will help meet the high demand for a similar one taught in-person at Emory.
"The reason I was interested in doing Coursera was that my [in-person] class only held 15 students, and there was always a big waiting list," he said. "If I can do a big, not-for-credit first semester course through Coursera, the students can use it as an unofficial prerequisite to get into my second semester course."
Lee Clontz, an adjunct faculty in the Journalism Program and a University Technological Services (UTS) specialist who helped create the courses, finds them "extremely flexible" after test-driving several himself.
"It's a really awesome opportunity for people who just want to learn something," Clontz said, who is currently enrolled in a calculus class on Coursera. "I don't want to go for a four-year degree. I just want to learn calculus. And at the end of this 15-week, free class, I'll know all I need to know about one semester of calculus."
Kimberly S. Hagen, director of the CFAR LINCS Initiative at the Center for AIDS Research at Emory, spent hours videotaping lectures for her AIDS course, which will launch Feb. 25 and feature "many experts on AIDS and public health."
According to Hagen, "A very large circle of faculty members will be teaching with me and delivering guest lectures." Over 10,000 students have signed up for her nine-week MOOC. Of the dozen students who emailed her personally, only one was a U.S. citizen – the rest came from India, Europe and Africa.
Hagen attributes the marginally foreign enrollment to lack of similar MOOC opportunities outside of the U.S. and the intrigue of taking classes sponsored by elite American universities.
"In some countries," she said, "this may be some people's only opportunity to take a college or graduate school course on a specific topic."
Of course, learning from a professor you've never spoken to has its drawbacks.
Emory Law School professor and Harvard Law honors graduate Polly Price cites the necessity of self-motivation as a disadvantage of the MOOC format. Price's six-week Coursera class, Immigration and U.S. Citizenship, begins April 29.
"Some students need the discipline of regular class attendance, with a professor who knows you are there to keep up with the pace of the learning," said Price, who considers the enormous class sizes a concern as well.
"MOOCs allow very little interaction with the instructor, given that thousands of students may be enrolled," she said. "An online platform with smaller, limited enrollment can avoid some of these disadvantages."
Though Price prefers the classroom setting, she enjoys the benefits of an expanded audience and new ability to convey the fundamentals of the subject she loves through Coursera.
Despite tens of thousands of enrolling students, MOOCs often suffer high rates of attrition, according to Clontz. In one course he took, the instructor informed students that 9,000 of the 90,000 who enrolled had successfully completed it and received certificates. This particular fraction – 10 percent – is considered above average for most online classes.
"People sign up because it's a free class," Clontz said. "But you need to follow through and invest some time."
Students like Clontz who do put in the time are not the only ones rewarded.
"A side benefit of this is the visibility of my own research," Everett said of his digital sound course. "I'm getting calls from around the world about what I do. This kind of way of advancing your work is something you hire marketing firms to do."
According to Everett, the impact on individual educators involved, as well as Emory's reputation, will be profound and positive, as any viewer with Internet access can see these professors in action.
The impact MOOCs have on learning efficiency and higher education will be even greater, Everett said, referencing an experiment conducted at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001. In the study, researchers compared the outcomes of two platforms of the same course – one online, the other standard, in-person. The online module would quiz students after every 10-15 minute video and review the problems test-takers answered incorrectly.
"The learning outcome of that [online] class was much higher than that of the standard, in-person class," Everett said.
Everett sees free MOOCs as a fast-growing, altruistic new branch of global academia.
"This whole MOOC phenomenon is what higher education is moving toward," he said. "I think in a few years, we'll have much more."
– By Lydia O'Neal
lmoneal@emory.edu
